Dungeon Crawler Carl

Title: Dungeon Crawler Carl
Author: Matt Dinniman
Published: October 2, 2020 by Dandy House
Format: Kindle, 464 Pages
Genre: Fantasy
Series: Dungeon Crawler Carl #1

Blurb: A man. His ex-girlfriend's cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible.

In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth—from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds—collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground.

The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot. A dungeon so enormous, it circles the entire globe.

Only a few dare venture inside. But once you're in, you can't get out. And what's worse, each level has a time limit. You have but days to find a staircase to the next level down, or it's game over. In this game, it's not about your strength or your dexterity. It's about your followers, your views. Your clout. It's about building an audience and killing those goblins with style.

You can't just survive here. You gotta survive big.

You gotta fight with vigor, with excitement. You gotta make them stand up and cheer. And if you do have that "it" factor, you may just find yourself with a following. That's the only way to truly survive in this game—with the help of the loot boxes dropped upon you by the generous benefactors watching from across the galaxy.

My Opinion: Yes, I fell for the hype and the influence of the book people in my life who insisted Dungeon Crawler Carl was “absolutely my thing.” For the record, I am not the intended demographic here. RPGs have never been part of my world, unless you count watching other people play them while I nod politely and pretend to follow. And yet, somehow, I still found myself giggling my way through Carl and Princess Donut’s increasingly unhinged dungeon adventures.

I’ll be honest: my brain absolutely refused to catalog the endless stream of loot, treasures, and stat boosts they kept accumulating. At some point, I adopted a personal policy of “they’ll have what they need, and if they don’t, they’ll figure it out.” That mindset kept me sane, and frankly, it seems to be working out just fine for them, too.

And Donut. Oh, Donut. Who among us can resist a snarky, self-important, chaos summoning cat with princess energy? She’s a lot, but she’s also the beating heart of the story in a way I didn’t expect.

As the book goes on, you meet humans and creatures who are more than just dungeon fodder. Their backstories sneak up on you with little pockets of hope in a world designed to crush them. And yes, hope is not a strategy, but sometimes it’s the only thing anyone has left. Those moments hit harder than I anticipated.

Now, fair warning: some of the squishier scenes are… well, squishy.

What surprised me most was how much deeper the themes run beneath the jokes, gore, and general absurdity. I went in expecting surface-level chaos and fart humor. Instead, Carl and Donut stumble into questions about group survival versus self-preservation, corporate ownership of human lives, greed, identity erosion, manipulation, the randomness of fate, resilience, ethics, and the strange ways partnership forms under pressure. There’s satire here, yes, but also a surprising amount to unpack if you’re willing to look past the show.

And the parallels to corporate America? Let’s just say the dungeon doesn’t even bother to hide the metaphor. Both systems treat people as expendable resources, constantly shift the rules, and reward performance over substance. The dungeon just makes the satire literal, and somehow, even more pointed.

At first, I had no idea how to rate this book. I wasn’t sure if it was for me or if I was just along for the ride out of curiosity. But as the challenges stacked and Carl and Princess Donut Best in Dungeon (her words, not mine) began to understand what they were truly up against, I found myself appreciating the unexpected depth. Donut may need an audience, but she’s also telling us something real beneath the theatrics. And honestly? I’m here for her.

A Judgement of Powers

Title: A Judgement of Powers
Author: Benedict Jacka
Published: November 4, 2025, by Ace
Format: Paperback, 352 Pages
Genre: Fantasy
Series: Inheritance of Magic #3

Blurb: Stephen Oakwood’s ambitions used to be simple. Pay his bills, track down his father, and take care of his cat. Maybe study a little magic after work, if he had time.

Now it’s a year later and he’s got everything he wanted. But it’s come with a price.

The Winged, a mysterious group involved with his father, have noticed Stephen, and they want him to join them or else. His career as a corporate locator has hit a dead end. And his new job as bodyguard to Calhoun Ashford is proving a lot more lethal than expected due to assassination attempts from outside the House, and possibly also from within.

To survive, Stephen’s going to need allies of his own. And along the way, he’s going to have to figure out the secret of his own gift, and what it means. The cults, Houses, and corporations of the magical world are locked in an endless battle for dominance, and Stephen is beginning to realize that he’s going to have to pick a side . . . before someone else picks it for him.

My Opinion: I went into this novel with a very specific kind of caution—the kind you develop when a series you want to love wobbles on its second outing. I adored An Inheritance of Magic. The follow up, An Instruction in Shadow, left me lukewarm at best. So, this third book? This was the make or break moment, especially knowing Jacka is aiming for 12–14 books. That’s a long road to commit to if the spark isn’t there.

Thankfully, Jacka comes roaring back with the confidence and clarity of his earlier work. From page one, he had me. No wasted space. He even manages a tidy recap, but it is not a substitute for reading the series in order.

Stephen Oakwood and his realizations continue to be the most compelling parts of this world. He’s always reminded me of Din Kol from Robert Jackson Bennett’s Shadow of the Leviathan series. Both 20-ish-year-old men are sharp, stubborn, a little battered, and endlessly compelling. If Din is your kind of protagonist, you’ll feel right at home here. The mystery, the magic, the banter, the characters, and their backstories are all here.

Now, Jacka still indulges in a habit of pausing to walk readers through the Houses, their leaders, their histories, and their specialties. For me, those sections always lag a bit. I’m not going to remember the finer points until they matter, and that’s fine. My brain files them under “retrieve later” and moves on. When they become plot critical, the details will snap into place.

There was one moment early on—a paragraph that seemed to be setting up something important—that never resurfaced. I kept waiting for it, convinced it was a breadcrumb for a later reveal. But it simply… vanished. Maybe it’s something Jacka cut or postponed for a future book. Maybe it’s a seed that hasn’t sprouted yet. Either way, it hovered in the back of my mind the entire time.

Oh, the ending. This is where Jacka reminds you exactly why you signed up for this series in the first place. A battle. A reckoning. A shift in purpose. Stephen finally steps into the direction he’s been circling since book one, and it feels honest. It feels right. It feels like the true beginning of the long game Jacka has been planning.

Let the games begin, indeed.

Life: A Love Story

Title: Life: A Love Story
Author: Elizabeth Berg
Published: March 17, 2026 by Random House
Format: Kindle, 208 Pages
Genre: Women's Fiction

Blurb: Florence “Flo” Greene is nearing the end of her life, and she decides to leave her house and an account of her life for Ruthie, the younger woman who grew up next door, moved away, and still is like a surrogate daughter. As Flo writes to Ruthie about the meaning of beloved things in her home and about events in her past, she also tries new adventures of her own. She intervenes in the lives of friends in her neighborhood.

Flo's project has been to encourage Teresa, a wise but unconfident woman, to open her heart to romance. Flo goes to the library to get advice from Mimi, a librarian. She encourages Ruthie, who is contemplating divorce, to try again with her husband, by sharing a startling secret long buried about Flo’s own seemingly perfect husband and marriage.

In her final weeks, Flo leaves an indelible mark on others, as this moving novel celebrates life, change, and ways to discover new happiness, friendship, and love.

My Opinion: I first discovered Elizabeth Berg through her Arthur Truluv novels, and I still think about Arthur, Maddy, and Lucille as if they were old friends I occasionally catch sight of. Not every book can recreate that particular magic, but I opened this novel hoping for that same quiet, heart-forward resonance.

This novel unfolds through correspondence and small side stories, a structure that feels both intimate and slightly old-fashioned in the best way. I understand why some readers compare it to ‘The Correspondent’ by Virginia Evans, though for me, it would be hard to match the presence of Sybil Van Antwerp. Then add in shades of ‘The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning’, you start to see what Berg is weaving together: reflections on faith, the wisdom that comes with age, the tenderness of found family, and the complicated grace of preparing for the end of life.

It’s a quick read, but not a light one. It will land differently depending on where you are in your own journey. Flo’s words—sometimes funny, sometimes piercing, sometimes so simple they sneak up on you—have a way of lodging themselves in your mind. Days later, one of her life lessons might bubble up unexpectedly, and you’ll pause, trying to remember where you heard it, before giving a small smile when you realize it was Flo whispering back to you.

And yes, there’s laughter. Berg always gives us that. But she also gives us the tears, the kind that come from recognizing something true about love, loss, or the strange, beautiful mess of being human.

Life: A Love Story may not be another Arthur Truluv, but it carries its own quiet, gentle, wise, and full-of-heart power.

Book of Forbidden Words

Title: Book of Forbidden Words
Author: Louise Fein
Published: February 17, 2026 by William Morrow Paperbacks
Format: Paperback, 384 Pages
Genre: Historical Fiction

Blurb: 1552, The print­ing press is quickly spreading new ideas across Europe, threatening the power of church and state and unleashing a wave of book burning and heretic hunting. When frightened ex-nun Lysbette Angiers arrives at Charlotte Guillard’s famous printing shop with her manuscript, neither woman knows just how far the powerful elite will go to prevent the spread of Lysbette’s audacious ideas. 1952, NEW Milly Bennett is a lonely housewife struggling to find her way in her new neighborhood amidst the paranoid clamors of McCarthy’s America. She finds her life taking an unexpected turn when a relic from her past presents her with a 400-year-old manuscript to decipher, pulling her into a vortex of danger that threatens to shatter her world.

From the risky backstreets of sixteenth-century Paris to the unpredictable suburbs of mid-twentieth century New York, the stakes couldn’t be higher when, 400 years apart, Milly, Lysbette, and Charlotte each face a reality where the spread of ideas are feared and every effort is made to suppress them.

Dramatic and affecting, and inspired by the real-life encrypted Voynich manuscript, Book of Forbidden Words is both an engrossing story about a timeless struggle that echoes through the ages and a testament to the indomitable spirit of those who dare to let their words be heard.

My Opinion: This novel is built on the idea that the suppression of knowledge is never a relic of the past; it simply changes form. This is the second novel of hers I’ve read, and once again I was drawn in from the opening chapters. The story moves between 1552 Paris and 1952 Levittown, NY, told through three distinct perspectives: Milly Bennett, with her secret Bletchley Park background; Lysbette, an ex-nun who was raised in the household of Sir Thomas More; and Charlotte Guillard, an historical printer navigating a man’s world. And you know a reader is going to be locked in when a novel opens in a world of banned books, heretic hunters, and the fear of new ideas. Fein uses these dual timelines not as a structural trick, but as a way to show how quickly moral panic takes root, and how easily societies convince themselves that censorship is a form of safety.

What gives the novel its texture is the interplay between these women and the eras they inhabit. Milly’s wry reference to the PTA women as “the coven” sets the tone for her humor and exasperation, while Lysbette and Charlotte carry the weight of earlier battles over who gets to print, read, or even think freely. Fein grounds their stories in the history of sixteenth century book burnings, McCarthy era paranoia, the coded manuscript echoing the Voynich mystery, and the rigid conformity of postwar suburbia. My interest in the novel rose and dipped in waves, but by the end, I found myself appreciating both the women at its center and the meticulous research Fein brings to their worlds.

Fein brings these threads together with historical detail supporting the story rather than overwhelming it. While my attention shifted throughout, I ultimately respected the scope of what she set out to do and the women she chose, each navigating a world determined to limit what they can know, say, or preserve. By the final chapters, the novel became less about a single mysterious manuscript and more about the enduring struggle against censorship in all its forms. It’s a thoughtful, well researched work, and I’m glad to have spent time with the women whose stories Fein brought forward.